By: JANA GREENE

If you’d never even seen a Bible, where would you find evidence of God?

It isn’t heresy to wonder, friends. He put the wonder there, in our spirits.

Think on it a second. If you’d never been “formally” introduced to the concept of God, would you believe in a higher power?

While we were busy paving paradise and putting up a parking lot, we decided Eden was all that great and that we could do better.

I see God as the vastness of the ocean, not fully understandable to us, but too full of life and wonder to be random occurrence.

But he is also made obvious by the minutia.

Tiny, insignificant plankton feed the krill, which in turn feed the whales. Imagine explaining to our ancestors that the largest animal on Earth subsists on the smallest!

And here’s the hook – phytoplankton exist because they turn sunshine into energy. Sunshine. In the great trickle-up of nature, we are made of sunshine, too. Not just anxiety, and angst, and sciatica pain.

If you had never read the words of a tome highlighted in red, would you walk through a forest and find evidence of his majesty? Knowing every bit of flora and fauna was making breathable air to sustain us all? I know we have been apt to describe the Spirit of God as “wind,” but what of his breath?

In a brick-and-mortar church, I learned that God made the earth, and it was good. It’s right there in the Bible.

In 9th grade biology, I learned that photosynthesis is the process of plants turn light energy into breathable oxygen. And that’s also good.

But both of those things, while true, can be dry as kindling or old bones, if Spirit is taken for granted. If the wind doesn’t reach us.

Do we know God beyond book-learning?

Because that’s where the synthesis in us takes place. As in every seed, we carry a holy blueprint. As in the lungs of the trees, we are continually provided refreshment and life. The sometimes slow, indivisible forces sustaining us are forever turning us from sunshine to being. And it is in the trusting of this that we are able to grow.

I pray you find God outside of the Bible today. I hope you smell a flower, hug a tree, or swim in the incredible proof of God that we call “water.” I hope a switch clicks in the recesses of your soul, and you realize the same care taken to create the world, went into making you.

God is real. He is majestic in the minutia of even this shit show, lending us his light to make our energy sustainable. His breath our existence. Our existence his breath.

Blessed be.